


We'll Never Get Our Deposit Back

by blythechild



Series: Gift Stories 2012 [9]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Christmas, Family, Food, Gen, Ghosts, Gift Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-07
Updated: 2014-12-07
Packaged: 2018-02-28 12:56:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,222
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2733347
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blythechild/pseuds/blythechild
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Sam sat on the curb outside the motel room, feeling sorry for himself and dripping turkey entrails, as Dean pulled up in the Impala."</p><p>Another Christmas is ruined for the Winchesters when they run across a ghost who has a dark sense of humor about holiday ornaments.</p><p> </p><p>This is a work of fanfiction and as such I do not claim ownership over the characters herein. It was created as a personal amusement. This story contains mild drug and alcohol references and shouldn't be read by those under the age of 14.</p>
            </blockquote>





	We'll Never Get Our Deposit Back

**Author's Note:**

> This is a gift fic for minouette. It is 2 years overdue… I'm sorry. I hope it was worth the wait :(

“I’m goin’ on a beer run. Want anything?” Dean jutted his chin at Sam and jangled the Impala’s keys in his hand. 

“It’s Christmas Eve and we’re in a dry county.” Sam raised an eyebrow.

“I know a guy who knows a guy,” Dean smirked. “And he knows a local alcoholic.”

“Okay. Get some cranberries.”

“Are you friggin’ serious? _Cranberries?_ ”

“It’s Christmas, Dean, you can’t do it without cranberries. It’s not like I’m asking you to find a bottle of Persephone’s tears or something. Gas stations carry them this time of year. Ask the alcoholic - maybe he has some.”

“Whatever, Marie Callender, but I’m not doing any heroics for them. I won’t be diving into any bogs for you. Damned rabbit food… If it comes in a can, you’ll smile and enjoy the wiggly, red turd.”

Sam made a face; cranberry jelly was an edible offense. “I’m impressed that you know that cranberries come from bogs.”

“Why? I know stuff too, Sammy. Remember that time in Quebec when we hunted that thing with the thingamabobs?” Dean made some vague clawing, fang-like gestures with his hands and suddenly Sam remembered that there had been a bog involved in that case. “Man, that was messy… I thought I was gonna have to wallpaper Baby with air fresheners to get rid of the stink afterwards…”

“Dean?”

“Yeah?”

“Beer.” Sam sensed that Dean was about to go on a tear about what a pain in the ass it was to learn exorcism spells in colloquial French.

Dean’s face lit up as though Sam had made the request out of thin air and then marched for the door eager to break some local ordinances. When Sam heard the Impala roar to life in the motel parking lot and then fade away, he looked around the shabby suite to assess his efforts. 

Christmas meant almost nothing to him; he’d never had one in a family home and therefore didn’t attach any sentimentality to the holiday. Dean, on the other hand, had a handful of family Christmas memories that he clung to without openly admitting his grief for the loss of his normality. The holiday was about family, and Dean was all that Sam had left. Most likely he was all that Sam would ever have. It was a sad reality that deepened their codependency. Sam’s chest tightened uncomfortably when he considered that someday, one of them would have to go through Christmas alone. Even though they spent the other 364 days of the year side by side, Sam tried to go out of his way on this one day to give Dean a sliver of the nostalgic life that he craved. 

He looked around the room and let himself feel a moment of pride: he’d done better this year than most. The crappy room had cable and a hot plate. A trip to Trader Joe’s and some ingenuity on his part and he’d managed to create a nearly-traditional Christmas dinner for them, even if they were going to have to settle for Jello pudding for dessert. Dean would bitch about the lack of pie. The Grinch was playing on TV (both he and Dean liked that one, even if Sam liked _A Charlie Brown Christmas_ more and Dean ribbed him every year about how Sam was secretly emo-Linus), and all was right with the world.

Then he noticed it. The cheap crucifix in the corner of the room was inverted. Just as Christmas meant nothing to Sam, so did Christian symbols: he didn’t feel either obligated or oppressed by their presence. In this part of the U.S. it wasn’t unusual to find crucifixes all over the place and he just ignored them, but even he understood the symbolism of an inverted cross to the faithful. He crossed the room and removed the crucifix from its nail, then righted it and re-hung it. _Weird_ , he thought, but his unnatural radar was already starting to ping. He turned back to face into the room and saw the ancient, fake Christmas tree the motel had provided in the corner - a Santa ornament and the Angel of the Lord were sixty-nining on the top of the tree.

“Oh, c’mon,” Sam mumbled. “Even I know that’s wrong.”

As he walked over and separated the sexually adventurous ornaments, he tried to convince himself that he’d been unobservant when they’d first arrived. Maybe this was just housekeeping having some fun. He wanted just one day without any _weird_ in it - he just wanted to give Dean his Christmas. Was that too much to ask? But no sooner had he fixed the tree then the TV station fuzzed out and came back into focus with something that looked like a Norwegian Death Metal concert. Sam flicked the remote but the unholy racket was on every channel. He turned the TV off but it flared back to life and at three times the normal volume.

“All right,” Sam sighed, and took inventory of what exorcism tools _hadn’t_ driven away with Dean in the Impala. “You win. Let’s do this.”

The lights started to flicker as if accepting Sam’s challenge, and Sam began to tear the room apart looking for totems, hex bags, talismans etc. The closet and bathroom doors began slamming, the wardrobe drawers started rattling and trying to dislodge themselves, a terrible clanging emanated from the bathroom plumbing, and the hotplate sparked until it succeeded in setting itself on fire.

“Not the food!” he barked, and then suddenly saw his breath as the room temperature plummeted.

A table lamp struck him from behind sending him to his knees. He thought he heard a voice yell _I never get what I want!_ , but with all of the banging and Death Metal it was hard to tell. The TV exploded in an impressive shower of sparks, but the music continued. The flare imprinted on his vision was that of a small, slim the silhouette, like a child. Another wave of cold hit him and he glanced around quick enough to dodge the carving knife that zipped past his head and lodged into the headboard behind him. The side of his neck stung and he clamped a hand over it. When he pulled it away, there was blood on it.

_I NEVER GET WHAT I WANT!_

“What do you want?” Sam yelled, trying to stall for time.

He had a bottle of holy water, salt, and his semi-automatic with silver bullets. Not much help against a vengeful spirit. Still, he lunged across the beds to his duffel bag and extracted the salt, quickly dusting a rough circle around him; he needed time to think up an exit strategy. It was a stop-gap against the ghost, but it did nothing against the projectiles, which was something he realized a moment before the delicious smell of roasted turkey overwhelmed him and everything went dark.

~~~~

Sam sat on the curb outside the motel room, feeling sorry for himself and dripping turkey entrails, as Dean pulled up in the Impala. His brother leapt out of the car with his go-to look of controlled ferocity, first staring down Sam and then being distracted by the billows of yellow smoke exiting their room. Sam could almost hear what Dean was thinking: _we’ll never get our deposit back._

“What the hell happened?! I was only gone forty minutes!”

“Poltergeist. Some kid died in the closet on Christmas Eve in 1967. His mom was a working girl. Put him in the closet when she had men over. He made too much noise one night - told her that he never got what other kids had for Christmas - and she stuffed a whole bunch of blankets in there with him to keep him quiet. I guess he suffocated.” Sam swiveled his laptop so that he could show Dean the research he’d done _after_ the fact. The computer had dried potatoes all over it. “WiFi still works out here. Go figure.”

Dean squinted at the screen and then sat down on the curb next to Sam. He looked Sam over and fixated on the dried blood along his throat.

“It’s fine. Flesh wound.”

“How did you take it down?”

“I basically had to set the room on fire, and it didn’t like that, so…” Sam gestured to the length of him that appeared to be equal parts soot, food, singed hair, and ruined clothes. “Sorry, Dean. Another crappy Christmas… and I almost got it right this year.”

“Stop talking bullshit, Sam. You think this Norman Rockwell stuff means anything to me?”

“I know it does. That’s why I try every year to give you one day when you can pretend that you have a different life.”

“Uh… I dunno what to say to that.” Dean stared at Sam and Sam just looked away and shrugged. A piece of turkey fell out of his hair. “Listen… do you think any of this holiday crap would mean anything if some dead brat had succeeded in turning you into a piñata in there? The only thing I give a damn about is you, Sammy. We’re family, and that’s all that this stupid holiday is really about anyway.”

“But we’re always together, Dean. Nothing special about that.”

“Are you kidding me?” Dean seemed genuinely hurt. “The hard truth is that one day, one of us is gonna run out of tricks. And that means that one of us is gonna get left behind.”

Sam’s chest squeezed so dramatically that he had to suck in a breath and hold it until the feeling subsided.

“Every day we’ve got comin’ to us before that happens is a gift. You understand? There is no ‘other life’ that we can pretend we had a shot at having. This is it. So, that means I’d rather have my brother around than a turkey dinner with all the fixin’s.”

Dean reached out and dragged a finger along the side of Sam’s face coming away with a mixture of turkey bits, gravy, and what might have once been green beans. He popped his finger in his mouth and smirked.

“Besides, if we rustle up some plates, we could probably scrape two servings off you and still celebrate in style.”

“Jerk,” Sam snorted.

“C’mere with yer hippie hair, Goldilocks. I want some potatoes…”

Sam swatted at Dean and in the process splattered him with remnants of their ill-fated meal. Dean’s face scrunched up in a ‘really, dude?’ expression before he shrugged it off and began scooping up the leftovers as proof that his plan was an excellent one.

“That’ll do, pig, that’ll do… Oh, hey! Almost forgot. The alcoholic came through.”

Dean bounded up and over to the car where he leaned in to fetch the beer and two bags that he presented triumphantly to Sam.

“See? We’re golden, Sammy.”

“Great. We’ve got no place to sleep and no clean clothes, but we’ve got bootleg beer and… what’s in the bag? A can of cranberry jelly?”

“No. I’m not sure that the alcoholic knew what month it was. But, he was baking up a bunch of special brownies when I got there, so I hung out for a while and snagged us half a dozen of those as well.” Dean wiggled his eyebrows and grinned like a fiend. “Better than Jello pudding, right?”

“ _Pot_ brownies?” Sam couldn’t hide his smile.

“Ya know, I think that it makes them moister than the regular ones…” Dean fished out an illicit treat and took a big bite. He moaned a little in apparent delight and then shoved the bag at Sam wrapping an arm around his gravy-stained shoulders. “C’mon, Linus. This is your shabby Christmas tree moment. Wrap that crap up in your woobie blanket and make the best of it. You killed a forty-eight year old ghost tonight and probably improved the décor of that motel room in the process. Have a frickin’ brownie.”

Sam chuckled and reached for a brownie, getting turkey and gravy all over the bag.

“You know, in about thirty minutes we’re gonna be starving,” he said.

“I’m all over it.” Dean opened the other bag and revealed a few bags of Doritos and Slim-Jims. “Tonight, we feast like high school dropouts!”

Sam took a big bite of brownie. Dean was right; they were pretty fantastic. His brother opened a beer and handed it to him before opening one of his own and clinking the necks together. 

“Merry Christmas, Sam.”

“Merry Christmas, Dean.”

They sat on the curb in front of their smoldering motel room drinking and eating in the satisfied silence of those who had narrowly avoided catastrophe. Again.

“You know, that kid ghost had the Christmas tree ornaments doing some moves that I’m pretty sure are still illegal in this state.” Sam finally broke the silence.

Dean raised his eyebrows. “Really?”

Sam nodded and shrugged at the same time as if to say _why would I make that up?_

“Huh. It seems that you came pretty close to your goal, Sam. The unnatural and porn… all we’d need to make this a traditional Winchester Christmas would be some pie.”

Sam rolled his eyes and took a long swig of his beer. How did he know that out of all of this, the one thing that Dean would choose to bitch about was the conspicuous lack of pie?


End file.
